Rising Ransomware: How Can Your Organization Implement a Zero-Trust Security Model?
By Mike Zawisza and The Prosperoware Team
As organizations shift to hybrid work environments, governance and data protection become more critical than ever. Cyberattacks — including ransomware — have increased by as much as 400% during the pandemic.
In the last few months, we have seen major attacks like SolarWinds and the Microsoft Server Exchange hack, sending a wake-up call that no one is immune to these incidents. That’s why organizations need to take measures to address data chaos, compliance, and security issues.
Adapting to this new shift requires Zero-Trust security and minimization of data across collaboration systems. Organizations should protect the data they need and minimize the data they don’t need.
Here’s how a Zero-Trust security model can protect your organization from damaging hacks.
Why Ransomware is a Threat and How Zero-Trust Helps
Ransomware attacks — often the result of users opening risky phishing emails — are dangerous because they rely on the two weakest points of any security system — human error and curiosity.
When an employee clicks on a suspicious link out of curiosity, they expose the organization to risk. Every data the employee has access to is now vulnerable. And when these hackers get into your system, they often go undetected for an average of 207 days, copying and deleting important data and intellectual property. By the time you realize you’ve been breached, the organization may already be on the line for millions of dollars in lost data and regulatory penalties.
To limit the damage and keep yourself and your organization safe in the event of what our CEO & Co-founder, Keith Lipman, calls a “bad day,” you should implement Zero-Trust security measures.
Applying Zero-Trust security across systems for internal and external users requires continuous verification of users and endpoints each time access is needed. This means no longer automatically assuming users need access to certain data and continuously evaluating when access needs to be terminated.
The more limited the access is to data on a need-to-know basis, the less the organization is vulnerable to data loss and hacks.
But, before you can set these policies in place, you need to ensure your organization is reducing data chaos and efficiently provisioning projects across collaboration systems, including Microsoft Teams.
Potential Barriers to Establishing Zero-Trust Security
The sudden change from in-office work to remote and hybrid environments meant organizations had to quickly deploy technology to enhance collaboration. Many chose Microsoft Teams. As transformative as Teams has been for collaboration and productivity, it faces several limitations, especially when it comes to provisioning, governance, and data security.
With organizations collaborating across large amounts of data, governing them efficiently can be overwhelming, especially since users may save data in their personal drives, contributing to data chaos and security risks. With data spread across several collaboration systems with limited metadata for context, users struggle to locate the right content to work on and risk management teams cannot understand context to properly apply security and minimization policies.
The solution is to consistently provision projects across systems with standardized naming conventions and folder structures, all while applying rich custom metadata to enable quick content location and application of security.
So, how does one go about provisioning and governing Teams and other collaboration systems?
Provisioning as a Foundation to Governance & Zero-Trust Security
Organizations can reduce data chaos by providing a logical place for users to store data. This is a crucial step to protect against ransomware and lays the foundation for a Zero-Trust strategy.
When users know where to place data, they are less likely to save it in their local drives, decreasing the risk that a hacker will get access to their content. Adding and tracking rich custom metadata — through software solutions like Prosperoware CAM — will allow users to quickly search and find their content, improving collaboration and productivity.
Once data is in the right place and metadata is tracked, your organization’s risk management team can easily understand the business context of data and apply relevant security and minimization policies. They can effectively manage access according to a Zero-Trust strategy and set up document archives through Azure or AWS so that they can efficiently access data in case of a breach.
While necessary for any organization that is serious about data security, these processes can be time-consuming if done manually. For example, it takes an organization 15 to 30 minutes to simply create a Teams structure and add the right people. When hundreds and thousands of projects or engagements are created on a monthly basis, doing it manually creates huge inefficiencies and poses privacy & cyber risks.
A software solution is needed to carry you that last mile.
How Prosperoware Helps
Prosperoware CAM is a Software-as-a-Service platform (SaaS) for adoption and governance of collaboration systems. It allows organizations to provision, classify, protect, move, and minimize data, mitigating data chaos and reducing risks related to privacy & cybersecurity.
CAM enables organizations to create logical locations for users to place data and provides rich custom metadata capabilities to empower users to locate data and risk management teams to understand context so they can apply the right security and minimization policies.
CAM integrates with Microsoft 365 (Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, OneNote, Planner, Lists), iManage, NetDocuments, HighQ, and more to come.
Here is what CAM can do for you:
- Provisioning of workspaces, Teams, Channels, Lists, Users & Groups, and folders from Project Portfolio Management, CRM etc., or through a human workflow using readily available templates.
- Rich, custom metadata for project or document context.
- Unified project directory for content location for end users and risk management teams.
- Provision automatically or on-demand internal & external users, manage permissions across collaboration systems, and integrate with leading ethical wall systems.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP) with activity monitoring and bulk security & metadata changes.
- Data protection by creating a separate archive of documents to access in case of incidents.
- Minimize data by setting automatic data disposition policies or apply litigation hold.
